Perfume River (23 page)

They rush on along the parkway as the accompanying Tillotson discreetly falls away and Robert and Darla step through the doors of the visitation room. They stop. Robert scans the place. It’s large and could be made larger. To the right, an accordion wall creates a doorway into a somewhat smaller, separated space, where trays of cold cuts and sides wait on a table whose other end, out of sight from Robert’s angle of vision, holds the Irish food before the tranquil-at-last gaze of Pegeen Quinlan. Informal settings of chairs and divans are arrayed all about, most of them facing to the left, where Robert has so far declined to look, though Darla’s head is already turned that way. The chairs and divans are empty but for two elderly women in hats on a chesterfield in the center of the floor. But it’s barely six o’clock. Kevin and his family are still on the way from the airport. Robert’s daughter Kimberly is arguing a case before the Connecticut supreme court in the morning. Peggy is nowhere visible, probably overseeing the food. That’s it for the immediate family, who are the only ones, by the protocol, you’d really expect to be here at the opening bell.

Robert needs to get this out of the way before all the others begin to arrive. He turns toward the left-hand wall, where Corinthian half columns flank the casket and ceiling spotlights shine softly down on its contents in what the Tillotsons no doubt have in mind as the gaze from Heaven. The contents at six o’clock, however, are presently blocked from view by the
backs of two old men in dark suits. Not Quinlans. Not likely to be Tillotsons. Still. So be it. Get it over with.

Robert touches Darla on the arm. “Give me a minute,” he says.

“Of course,” she says.

He moves off in the direction of the casket, and as he approaches, the two men begin to turn. He realizes who they must be. These veteran faces are different in detail from the beignet boys, but they are the same in wizened ethos. These are Bill’s coffee buddies from the Thomasville chapter of the Greatest Generation.

“You must be his son,” one of them says.

Robert takes the man’s offered hand and says, “Yes, Robert,” thinking,
He didn’t say
“
One
of his sons.” Of course not. Jimmy never existed.

But it surprises him that his father acknowledged
his
existence to these men, given the recent revelation.

He has missed hearing the name of the first veteran and finds himself shaking the hand of the second as the man finishes the last couple of syllables of his. “… field.”

The first vet says, “Harley and me served on the Western Front the same time your dad did.”

“We all had coffee and Dunkin’ Donuts pretty near every week,” Harley says.

“In Thomasville?”

“Yep. He loved his Glazed and his Original Joe.”

“He was very proud of you,” the first man says.

This flips Robert’s face sharply back to him.

Confident he understands the look in Robert’s eyes, the man says: “Not that he said much about your experience. He respected your silence.”

And the second vet says, “But the little he did say … Well, we all understand the tough job and the short life span of infantry lieutenants in Vietnam.” He gives Robert a knowing nod and offers his hand for another shake. “Thank you for your service.”

Robert does not take the hand. If the refusal hurts the man’s feelings, it’s his donut buddy’s lying fucking fault.
That wasn’t the service I rendered. I was a cowardly specialist fourth class hiding in a bunker counting beans.

But the man thinks he understands Robert’s hesitation. He straightens up, withdraws the offered shake, and turns it into a salute, holding a strack pose. “Sergeant Harlan Summerfield offers his gratitude, sir.”

Shit. Shit.
Robert can’t keep up the rebuff. It’s not this man’s fault. But neither can he explain. So Robert returns the goddamn salute, forced to buy into the lie of his humiliated father, whose body Robert is suddenly, acutely aware of. It’s presently reduced to a chest-to-crotch view by the frame of intervening vets, laid out in his one wearable but outdated suit, a dark gray pinstripe with padded shoulders and wide lapels, his hands crossed over his bowels.

The two men pick up on the shift of Robert’s attention.

“We’ll leave you with him now,” the first one says.

“Just wanted to pay our respects,” the second one says.

Robert is clenching in the chest as if he were about to step out of a banyan tree in the dark.

“Good to meet you,” one or the other of them says.

And the two men step aside and vanish.

Robert moves forward into an aura of dry cleaner perc and mortuary pancake, and he stands alone now in front of his dead father.

Beneath the veneer of a Tillotson tan, William Quinlan’s dumb Sunday-doze face is fixed for eternity, the face that always seemed to Robert, in its own parsimonious way, to allow that nothing was terribly wrong between the two of them. The face that said, without actually saying it:
Even though I don’t offer any details, you’re sufficiently okay by me that I can simply sleep in your presence in this apparently unperturbed way.

The old man sleeps that way now. Couched in that lie. But even if he were suddenly to wake, brought back for just a few climactic moments, and if he were to look Robert in the eyes and say to him,
I know what you really want to do, so okay, go ahead, punch me in the face if you got the balls, take your best shot
, Robert would not be able to lift an arm or make a fist, would not even be able to lift a lip into a sneer. All he has is a handful of words:
Go back to sleep, Pops.
Robert feels weary. Deeply weary. Simply weary. He feels seventy fucking years old.
Go back to sleep.

A hand on his shoulder and he starts.

He’s done with the casket anyway.

He turns.

It’s his mother.

She opens her arms.

He is as little inclined to accept this gesture as he was Sergeant Summerfield’s salute. But he is even less capable of brushing it aside. He puts his arms around her, telling himself,
This embrace isn’t about my feelings for him. It’s about her. It’s just for her. That’s her dead husband in the casket and she loved him, in her own way. In her own way she loved him very much, so I can hold her and kiss her now on the cheek.
Which he does, and he says, “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

“I know,” she says.

She kisses his cheek in return. Then she brings her mouth very near his ear and whispers, “Who are those people?”

Robert whispers in return, “A couple of his World War Two buddies.”

“Really,” she says, with a thump of a tone, meaning
How come he never mentioned them to me?

She lets Robert gently disengage the embrace.

“They’re casual coffee buddies,” he says.

Darla has drawn near.

Robert sees her over Peggy’s shoulder, turns his face to her.

Darla, however, is focused on her mother-in-law. The back of Peggy’s head; her ashen hair rolled plain and tight; her arms falling from the embrace of her son into a slump of her narrow shoulders; her usual wiry vigorousness transformed abruptly into a bony dwindling, like a twentysomething cat. And she thinks of all the recent mother-daughter words. All the grief words. And the riddance words. And the Irish food prep. These
things suddenly signify for Darla. Signify in a way that can, in a century-old monument, elicit her compassion for women long dead. So why not here, for this flesh-and-blood woman?

“Peggy,” she says, the consideration of using
Mom
having flashed into her and out again in a nanosecond.
Maybe another time.

Peggy turns to her, brightens, throws open her arms, embraces her, pats her.

“I’m so glad you’re with me tonight,” Peggy says.

“I am too,” Darla says.

“Can you help me greet people now and then? Not to monopolize you. Robert needs you too.”

“Of course,” Darla says.

Peggy lets go of Darla, pulls back a bit, looks her in the eyes. “Thank you,” she says. She lets that register, and then she says, “Would you like a few moments with Bill now?”

Peggy Peggy Peggy. How do I say
No
to that? You have a talent.
Darla says, “Of course.”

Peggy nods, steps away, revealing Robert still stuck standing where he was, looking at his wife with one side of his mouth and the corresponding curve of his cheek clenched in irony. “I’ll give you a few moments,” he says, and he too moves away.

Darla wants to rap him in the arm with a knuckle as he passes. She wants simply to follow him.

But she steps forward.

Her father-in-law’s face is a crude likeness, molded in hand-puppet rubber. But it’s him. No doubt. The distortion is simply death. It’s the stuff he’s pumped full of instead of
blood. It’s all the makeup. And yet:
I envy Robert.
This thought surprises her. She does envy him. Her own father went face forward through his windshield and into an overpass pier. Darla and her brother, far away from the bodies, made the decision by telephone. It was logical.
Don’t wait for us. Close the caskets. Seal them up. We don’t need to see our parents in that state. I don’t need to see the wrecked face of my wrecked father.
But she did. And she didn’t know it until now, as she looks at the face of this boring, emotionally obtuse, river-dock-macho, son-bullying, simplistically jingoistic man lying here dead. As altered as the man’s face is, this moment with William Quinlan still feels like a kind of existential intimacy, and much to her surprise and a little to her horror, she ardently wishes she’d had a chance for these concluding moments of closeness with her own father. As bullying and politically knuckleheaded as he could be. As passionate over sausages and conservatism but reticent over her. So why does she long for that lost opportunity, to see his final mask of reticence? Her mind replies:
Perhaps because it would say to you: This is the ultimate him and so it was always him. A him apart from you. A him he would have arrived at whether he felt tenderly about you or not. Whether you ever existed or not. You did not create the chill in him. You did not earn it. If he could give no more in life, it was only because he was destined to die. That dark wind was already upon his face. If you’d had these final moments with him, perhaps you could have understood all that for yourself. More than understood. You could have actually felt it.

But as she stands before this other father, these are only thoughts.

And so she aches.

Her eyes fill with tears.

She rues them. Rues they’ll be construed as mourning William Quinlan. Rues they could not fall upon her own father’s face.

She waits for them to subside.

She glances over her shoulder.

Robert is disappearing through the door into the visitation room foyer. Peggy is approaching two elderly couples Darla does not recognize.

And Peggy reaches these strangers now, the two old men and, apparently, their two wives. The women are rising from the chesterfield.

“Hello,” she says.

The two men turn.

“Thank you for coming.” She speaks with the exaggerated brightness of decorous disdain: These men are the first outsiders to mourn her husband, and she has never heard a word about them.

“I’m Peggy Quinlan,” she says.

At least they seem to recognize who she is. As soon as they all finish fluttering their names and their condolences at her, Peggy ignores the wives and looks from one veteran to the other as she says, “Remind me where Bill first met you.”

“Over at the American Legion hall.”

Neither has Bill ever mentioned the American Legion, much less its hall.

Peggy certainly has no intention of revealing her ignorance of all this. Fortunately, her three friends from church have finished in the kitchen and are now entering the room through its double door from the back hallway.

Peggy nods in the direction of their arrival. “You’ll excuse me.”

The strangers clamor their understanding.

She takes each of their offered hands and says, “Please step into the next room and have some food. There’s Irish stew. It was Bill’s favorite. Perhaps you knew?” She does not pause to have that confirmed or denied. Either way it would piss her off. “Or there are plenty of other things. Please.”

The veterans and their wives all agree to eat.

Peggy moves off toward her friends from St. Mary’s Catholic Church. They’ve taken a turn toward the casket, but the steps of her pursuit slow as she finds her mind accelerating to a thing she thought she left behind in New Orleans, a thing surely already dead, dead on its own, a thing that certainly has no business in her life now, not with the man himself dead, but it does have a life. It very much does. Because if he moved to Georgia and found these two men for friends and she never heard a word about them, then it proves he was capable of a private life full of people he kept from her. Worse. It proves everything she feared in New Orleans, feared for decades: His going off most every afternoon wasn’t simply for a drive and some coffee. It was for a woman. A woman he loved. Loved instead of her.

She has slowed now to a stop.

Ahead of her, the three friends are lined up before Bill.

She turns her back on them.

The strangers are heading for the food. Robert has vanished. Darla is in the process of vanishing as well, out the entrance door of the visitation room.

And Jimmy once again nears the Tillotson Funeral Home, featuring William Quinlan like the star of his latest movie—
Husband, Father, Veteran.
Jimmy and Heather have been chased back by the Impala’s open fresh air vent. A few miles down Apalachee Parkway it sucked in the nighttime stink of the tree-shrouded Leon County dump, a clear sign to both of them that they should give up the drive.

He pulls into the first empty space, far from the few other cars and the floodlit house.

He turns off the engine but does not move.

Heather says, “Cold feet?”

“The back of the crowd at the cemetery is one thing. But doing this … I don’t know.”

“Baby,” she says. “You want to put
him
in the ground, not just a casket. You need to see him in it, don’t you think?”